Bhatinda: A local resident by name Jaswinder Singh Jassi, who is well known in the area for occasionally crashing weddings and consuming copious amounts of food and drinks, now has an advice or two to offer to the catering companies that provide meals during weddings.

Jassi apparently has developed a chronic allergy to Shahi Paneer and Dal Makhani after having consumed food at 15 different weddings in the past 3 weeks and now wants caterers to change gears and bring in new menu items for guests.

Time to move beyond the traditional food items?

Jassi’s suggestions have sparked serious discussion in catering community, since Shahi Paneer and Dal Makhani have been regularly served at Indian weddings since hundreds of years and are well known as staple diet of wedding attenders in India. Infact even the Indian wedding dinners with themes such as Italian, Mexican and American food also have been generally mandated to carry 2 separate counters for Shahi Paneer and Dal Makhani. But Jassi has stirred the hornet’s nest by challenging this age old tradition. He talked exclusively to Faking News on the subject and explained his concerns.

“I have attended 127 weddings and 95 pre-wedding functions such as sagai, mehndi, sangeet etc. across India in last 1 year. If there is an undisputed expert on wedding food in India, that is me. And if I want these two food items out of the meal menu, then it really means something. Look at it this way, people are busy these days, still they take time out to come to your wedding and stay long hours. People don’t have money these days to take a taxi instead of bus but still they give you some ‘Shagun‘. Gold is so expensive these days but people still come to your wedding wearing tonnes of jewelry. Please don’t insult these sacrificing souls with conventional & normal food, innovation is the key. Change the complete theme of your wedding dinner. Get all the food from Subway and McDonalds if you have to. But same old paneer, dal, peas pulao, butter naan, obliquely slashed cucumber, kulfi etc. … I mean when will the Indian weddings finally grow up?” – Jassi said in a serious tone.

While Jassi has been making tall claims on food expertise, not everyone sees eye to eye with his thoughts.

Senior psychologist at Punjab National Hospital Dr Baitra, who has been studying wedding gate-crashers for past 15 years shares some interesting insights on why Jassi’s fight against conventional wedding food may not exactly be what he is claiming it to be.

“Jassi is a compulsive case of wedding crashers. He is now unable to consume meals at any place other than at weddings. He attends four to five wedding functions a week on average. He has been beaten up and thrown out of several weddings and on one occasion even spent 3 days in police lockup for gate crashing a businessman’s wedding in a 5-star hotel, yet all this has not changed his behavior. But now he is feeling a sort of repulsion against wedding food, because wedding food we largely know is exactly same across the country and across weddings. So when he says he wants innovation in wedding food for guests, he is just fighting for a better food variety for himself,” Dr. Baitra said with authority.

While Jassi is being dubbed as compulsive medical case by psychologists, many wedding catering companies are considering having him on payroll as a senior food experience evangelist and menu designer.

Jagan Prasad, owner of “Happy Foods and Caterers” told Faking News – “We generally provide a list of menu items to the family, which is holding wedding, and they choose from that list. These menu item lists are largely unchanged for generations now, except for introduction of Baby corn starters a few years back. If someone like Jassi can help us add innovative food items to these age old lists he would be a great addition to our in-house corporate team.”